Large data centers often involve significant manual administration efforts. These tasks can be labor intensive, time consuming and prone to human error. In some cases, data centers may occupy many rooms, each room filled with numerous racks of equipment including large numbers of servers in each rack. Each server may host large numbers of application services along with associated software, operating systems, network interfaces, etc.
Typically, all of this information, regarding locations of servers and associated service applications and other related components, is manually entered in a database. The resulting database may therefore not always be kept up to date and may contain errors. Additionally, shared components such as virtualized server platforms are often not correlated with the applications that they support, leading to further inaccuracies in the database. Furthermore, when new servers are installed, system administrators must manually determine where rack space and power are available. If there are errors in the database with respect to locations, a physical search of all the racks must be performed which is also time consuming and which depends on the existence of accurate physical labeling on the servers.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications, and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.